AMD Kaveri A10-7850K and A8-7600 review: Was it worth the wait for the first true heterogeneous chip?

Steamroller: Trading frequency for IPC

AMD has been keen to stress the graphics and HSA improvements baked into its next-generation APU, but the CPU side of the equation is just as vital. Ever since Bulldozer, AMD has been fighting a desperate rear-guard action in processor technology. The company’s single-threaded performance has been too low, while the 20% multi-threading performance hit that Bulldozer and Piledriver take compared to a conventional multi-core design has been too high. Piledriver and Richland addressed part of the problem by hitting higher frequencies, but AMD has needed a fundamental overhaul of the Bulldozer architecture for years. Today, it gets one — but at a cost.

When AMD designed Kaveri, it opted to migrate to GlobalFoundries’ 28nm SHP (Super High Performance) node. 28nm-SHP is a node GF built specifically for AMD. Critically, however, this node uses bulk silicon, not the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology AMD has relied upon for superior power and frequency targets for more than a decade. In moving to bulk silicon, AMD had to give up some of its frequency scaling. Thus, the A10-7850K has a base speed of 3.7GHz and a Turbo Mode of 4GHz, as compared to the Richland APU’s 4.1GHz base and 4.4GHz Turbo.

According to AMD, Steamroller offers a 5-10% improvement in single-threaded IPC and a 15-20% improvement in multithreaded IPC. The latter is significantly better precisely because Steamroller doesn’t share some of the core resources that led to inefficient processing in earlier platforms. But the takeaway is clear — in multithreaded workloads, where it can leverage its front-end changes, Steamroller may exceed Richland’s performance despite its clock speed gap. Single-threaded performance will be better on IPC, but should be flat overall.

We have two different APUs to consider today — a 45W APU that AMD intends to market as a Steambox-style chip with a variable TDP, and the higher-end 95W chip with better raw performance. The “variable TDP” option means that end users will be able to manually select which TDP they want the chip to target — at 45W, the A8-7600 has a max turbo frequency of ~3.4GHz, while the 65W variant will push up to 3.7GHz when all four cores are loaded.

Readers should be aware, however, that the A8-7600 and its variable TDP aren’t actually launching today. The A10-7850K is expected to be widely available immediately, but the A8-7600 isn’t.We’re including it here, but that particular part is paper launched until some time later in Q1. AMD was unable to provide tighter guidance. We tested the A10-7850K and A10-6800K in an Asus A88X-Pro motherboard, and the A8-7600 and A8-6500T in an Asrock FMA2A88X-ITX. As a comparison, the Intel Core i3-4330 and Core i5-4670S were both benchmarked in a Gigabyte Z87X-D3H. We used 8GB of Mushkin-DDR3-2133 in all cases — AMD sent along some DDR3-2400, but time constraints prevented us from evaluating Kaveri’s performance using the highest-speed memory available. All systems were tested using a fully patched version of Windows 8.1

how about power consumption?(i understand that you didn’t have time for that) if it improves performance/watt enough than there will be a reason to buy this, especially for laptops.

Joel Hruska

I only had a few days to test both cores. I confirmed that the A8-7600 was staying within similar power envelopes as the 6500T, and the same for the 100W APUs. Thus the 7600 is the big efficiency winner. Non-gaming power efficiency on the A10-7850K is flat.

Joel Hruska

The A8-7600 won’t be a laptop chip. It’s possible that AMD’s laptop chips that are Kaveri based will show significant gains over the current crop of parts. In fact, I think that’s a fairly reasonable assumption to make at this point.

massau

laptop chips are for the end H1 to bad that it is a little bit “late” for me. (my laptop broke), also many thanks for replying so fast.

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fteoOpty648

Yeah, at 45watts, the 7600 is not going to be in bulky laptops that people do not want now since Intel plus discrete NV gpu seems very abundant within the $600 price point.
Kaveri is going to look way better on 20nm node and fantastic on 14nm Finfet. I can imagine a 6 billion transistor chip sipping 15watts at full bore around 2.5Ghz frequency range. The ARM server chips with HSA is going to take over the Cloud in no time. It is going to be a revolution in hardware again in about 3 quarters ….. exicting times.

Joel Hruska

They aren’t abundant at all. You can’t even find a good discrete GPU below the $700 price point in an Intel system.

Kaveri won’t be built on 20nm or 14nm. By 20nm AMD will have Excavator. By 14nm, we should see a new chip altogether. And the ARM chips don’t have HSA this year.

beomagi

The table in the conclusion may work best up front – I was looking for something like that before reading through the graphs.

Any comparison to vishera 6/8 core chips/use of dedicated GPU coming?

Joel Hruska

Not in the next few days. Dual graphics capability isn’t fully baked yet. But there appear to be two different performance scenarios:

The high-end Vishera chips will beat past Kaveri if high clock speed matters. They’ll beat past Kaveri if multi-threading >4 threads matters. So that means the advantages of gaming on Kaveri are going to be either Mantle or dual-graphics-related — and neither of those functions is ready.

Ken Luskin

20 NEW games.. VIRTUALLY ALL NEW games will use MANTLE!

CLUE IN!!

MANTLE improves game performance by 45%!

This is what you FAIL to understand!!

Dozerman

Not you again…

mars mayflower

it only improves games when they are cpu limited. the new A10 is still very gpu limited for modern games so its not going to make a huge difference.

Dan Barkley

Power consumption? One of the most important aspects for us in Europe omitted here and at Anand.

Joel Hruska

I spot-checked power consumption on the 6500T and 7600 to confirm that both were staying in the 40-50W range for the whole system. They were. Right now, that’s what I’ve got. But we’re literally talking about spot checks, not huge amounts of testing, so I don’t claim that this is hugely representative.

Dan Barkley

Sorry, I often type first and read the comments second.

Thomas Cheng

Well, I think AMD did the right thing targeting the casual market with
this chip. Most people these days buy cheap laptops to browse the web
and play some games. You don’t need much power to run a web browser,
but you need lots of power to run a game. So this chip seems to hit all
the right marks for that. For Hardcore gamers, servers and workstation
type of work, I think the apu is not good for us. Anyway, overall is
good news for AMD.

Joel Hruska

The 45W gains are impressive, but AMD needs a better balance.

Thomas Cheng

Its too early to say. Releasing the hardware is the first step, finding software to show it off is the next step. I hear HSA development kits are about to be released soon, so give it a few more months for small programs and 1 or 2 years for bigger programs. Definitely with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One released, we will see HSA support from game developers first, assuming those consoles uses HSA supported APUs. I’m almost confident that HSA will take off, but I’m pretty sure Mantle will be the selling point for these APUs. If they can hit the 45% increase in performance, you should be able to run Battlefield 4 in 1080p with high quality mode. This will make these cheap apus perfect for htpc. I know I will build one.

Joel Hruska

I don’t think it’s too early to say. The APIs and SDKs used to build HSA apps won’t be done for 3-6 months. Then, everything has to be rearchitected.

We’re 12-18 months from significant uptake for HSA, minimum. That’s just the nature of the beast.

If you like Kaveri, buy it for its perf in non-Mantle games and non-HSA apps. By the time either of the other features is ramped, the next-gen APUs will be on the market.

Terrance Earle

These benchmarks aren’t right, seen several sites already. I ordered mine I’ll even upload benchmarks.

Joel Hruska

If you think you’ve spotted a problem with the review, please state the specific benchmark and question.

Hakob Panosyan

I think there is one problem with both this and the Anandtech review of Kaveri chips. There is also something in common in both, the Asrock motherboard. Anandtech mentioned of overheating issues so I think the problem is tied to the motherboard.
I have seen an unofficial pre-launch review on a forum and the guy said he had obtained a retail variant of Kaveri but I think he used regular Catalyst drivers because he didn’t get the release drivers from AMD, but the most important part was that he was running on the ASUS A88X motherboard and on CPU Gaming tests along with a 7950 it showed some impressive improvements over the 5800K both stock and overclocked (5800K overclocked to 4.4GHz and 7850K at 4.5GHZ).

so we shall see exactly what the 7950 and all the rest of the nvidia/AMD 3rd party cards he has available will do then on the ASUS A88X motherboard.

i expect the current AMD RadeonSI cards to run at around half/ 2/3’s the speed of Nvidia cards on average (they seem to have a bottleneck on) Linux/SteamOS as per the older results there…

“Anandtech mentioned of [potential !]overheating issues” due to only having a low profile mATX cooler/fan available to fit there at that time, if i remember right without re-checking…

Joel Hruska

Interesting you mention this. I did have a bit of stability trouble but pinned it on early drivers

ziffster1

“I think he used regular Catalyst drivers because he didn’t get the release drivers from AMD”

no he didnt, or at least not successfully as that was the very first thing phoronix did was to run through all the current and prior drivers to test functionality , they all badly failed in one way or another until he loaded the bata drivers as per that link

Joel Hruska

All of my performance figures fall within the guidelines established by AMD in the RG and communicated to me privately. They have a concern about the CorelDraw perrformance, which is why I added an asterix to it. Everything else was as expected.

When we write reviews of a company’s products, we work *with* the company to ensure that our performance numbers match their internal expectations. If they don’t, we hash it out until they do.

Mark

“When we write reviews of a company’s products, we work *with* the
company to ensure that our performance numbers match their internal
expectations. If they don’t, we hash it out until they do.”

I’m not a tech guru, but I do know a bit about test and evaluation. How can your review be considered objective if your results are negotiated with the manufacturer?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the article and I learned a lot about how the APU works, but this statement blew me away.

Joel Hruska

Mark,

So, there’s a fine point here. Let me explain it this way:

AMD distributes a Reviewer’s Guide that contains facts and figures on how the chip is expected to perform. Then they ship a kit out. I test the kit. If my performance figures don’t match AMD’s, it means something is typically wrong with those benchmark results.

Hashing out, in this context, doesn’t mean “We negotiate test results.” It means “I’m not seeing the performance you claim I should be seeing.” And subtle things can make a significant difference. PCMark 7 will run on any Windows system, but installing .NET 3.5 SP1 improves performance in PCMark 7 by about 7%. If I’m seeing Cinebench scores lower than AMD claims, it may be because Turbo Mode isn’t working properly due to a missing BIOS update.

Now, what we don’t negotiate about is benchmark *choice.* AMD is welcome to recommend certain benchmarks. If I think those benchmarks are good, I’ll use them. If I think they’re duplicative or unfair, I don’t. Similarly, if AMD recommends specific settings for a given title that I don’t think represent how people use that title or product, I won’t use those settings. I may *test* them to make sure performance looks the way it should, but I may not use the results at all.

Remember: We often receive equipment that’s not 100% ready for prime time. It’s not unusual to get early revision motherboards that require tweaking or have incomplete feature results. Synching up with a manufacturer on what expected performance looks like is important for ensuring that results are representative. It doesn’t mean they get to pick the benchmarks.

Joel Hruska

Mark,

So, there’s a fine point here. Let me explain it this way:

AMD distributes a Reviewer’s Guide that contains facts and figures on how the chip is expected to perform. Then they ship a kit out. I test the kit. If my performance figures don’t match AMD’s, it means something is typically wrong with those benchmark results.

Hashing out, in this context, doesn’t mean “We negotiate test results.” It means “I’m not seeing the performance you claim I should be seeing.” And subtle things can make a significant difference. PCMark 7 will run on any Windows system, but installing .NET 3.5 SP1 improves performance in PCMark 7 by about 7%. If I’m seeing Cinebench scores lower than AMD claims, it may be because Turbo Mode isn’t working properly due to a missing BIOS update.

Now, what we don’t negotiate about is benchmark *choice.* AMD is welcome to recommend certain benchmarks. If I think those benchmarks are good, I’ll use them. If I think they’re duplicative or unfair, I don’t. Similarly, if AMD recommends specific settings for a given title that I don’t think represent how people use that title or product, I won’t use those settings. I may *test* them to make sure performance looks the way it should, but I may not use the results at all.

Remember: We often receive equipment that’s not 100% ready for prime time. It’s not unusual to get early revision motherboards that require tweaking or have incomplete feature results. Synching up with a manufacturer on what expected performance looks like is important for ensuring that results are representative. It doesn’t mean they get to pick the benchmarks.

Mark

Thanks for the clarification.

Joel Hruska

Mark,

It’s a fine line. Generally speaking, manufacturers will choose tests that present their products in the best light, but will not attempt to skew the results of those tests within their own disclosures. Sneaking in bad results is too easy to catch once the reviewer has the hardware for independent study.

Joel Hruska

Mark,

It’s a fine line. Generally speaking, manufacturers will choose tests that present their products in the best light, but will not attempt to skew the results of those tests within their own disclosures. Sneaking in bad results is too easy to catch once the reviewer has the hardware for independent study.

ziffster1

seen reviews but only ordered it, so you saying the “benchmarks aren’t right” seems an odd false assumption at the moment until you actually get it up and running on your desk, but i hope you do benchmark even if the results are not what you expect…. in fact be sure to also run the http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/ too on windows and/or Linux, then upload them to the servers and here, x264 will be interesting as he updated it last week…

AN6

Nice job there, but my main will still be an FX

Dozerman

Too bad we’re seeing Piledriver through ’14. Hopefully, AMD is just taking an Intelish approach and releasing their high end CPUs a year behind the mainstream ones and not actually canceling FX. I would love to see what steamroller fixed for the older 28nm process and allowed higher TDPs could do.

Joel Hruska

Steamroller isn’t broken. There’s nothing to fix. This is a process implementation fact, not a broken chip.

Dozerman

I think you misunderstood what I meant; I never meant that it was broken and needed fixing. By “fixed”, I meant “modified for a specific purpose”, as in modified to work easier with the old 28nm that they had been using for higher clocks, but with lower transistor densities ( not likely going to happen). This is a usage of the word that I rarely see outside of the South, so my apologies for the confusion. It’s easy to forget that not everyone on the internet uses the same terms as I have been raised using…

Joel Hruska

Huh. I’m familiar with the use of “fix” as in “I’m fixin’ too” (I am about to do something), because I spent some years in KY, but I’d never heard that one.

The old process they used for Piledriver was 32nm SOI. It would be interesting to see Steamroller on that process, but obviously AMD decided not to use it for reasons of their own.

Dozerman

Yeah, people around the Gulf Coast region will say something along the lines of “yeah, I got muh truck fixed up fer mud boggin” and the such.

I was actually thinking more along the lines of TSMC’s 28nm SOI, although I’m sure they have licensing agreements with GF for FX series chips, right?

Joel Hruska

No. Not that we know of. All “Big cores” from AMD are GF-built.

Joel Hruska

No. Not that we know of. All “Big cores” from AMD are GF-built.

Xplorer4x4

I live near the southern tip of Indiana, and it’s not an uncommon use of the word around here..maybe we are just to close to KY though. :p

ziffster1

it would be far more interesting to see AMD licence the Arm CCN and related Wide IO2 ram controller ,then rip out the current DDR3 stuff and just use the lower latency/power 512bit Wide IO 2 option(4x128bit channels of DDR3 ) ASAP

Sure, Wide I/O could be a gamechanger. When the company predicts “goes into widespread production in 2015” that means “Actually starts shipping in 2016.” And as far as *practical* integrated applications for something as specialized as an APU, you’re looking at 2017 or 2018.

It’s a very interesting technology but it has no practical near-term upside.

Joel Hruska

Sure, Wide I/O could be a gamechanger. When the company predicts “goes into widespread production in 2015” that means “Actually starts shipping in 2016.” And as far as *practical* integrated applications for something as specialized as an APU, you’re looking at 2017 or 2018.

It’s a very interesting technology but it has no practical near-term upside.

ziffster1

if they cant make it in the near term as they are to busy fighting over who pays when the business model they pick fails, then i might as well wait for the commercial freescale/EverSpin MRAM at 90nm to come down to say 40nm then it will be faster than Dram, and they can then make them in wide IO and HMC configurations , and perhaps then it might become a near universal fast and large non volatile ram some day…

Joel Hruska

I think pinning your hopes on any next-gen memory gain to appear at some arbitrary point is for suckers. Widcon is impressive. HMC is impressive. MRAM, FeRAM, all have promise.

If the past teaches anything, it’s that the market favors low-cost, highly scalable, evolutionary approaches. So while I acknowledge that many technologies are impressive as hell, I don’t expect them to come to market quickly or to reinvent anything if they actually ship. True game-changing innovation is a rare event.

ziffster1

true, and id only mention them as “a major point of reference” as iv done for years now, while keeping an eye on the faster shifting retail sands now, and perhaps they will appear as expected in a form you want to buy(no sale ,No profit) , then and only then would i pay out the big money for a major upgrade.

if (PC) retailers will not provide what people want to actually buy then they simply buy other things elsewhere instead, and that’s a pretty standard thing for most end users, and a good reason the PC markets on the slide downhill now.

nothing worth really spending on for a full expensive PC upgrade , so ill look to the ARM and 3rd party interesting kit until they have something worth buying again if ever, id go through 3 and 4 full personal PC systems in days gone by, not any more alas.

fteoOpty648

Since AMD canceled all the FX chips sometime ago, then 32nm SOI is “water under the bridge”. But but if AMD were to do a limited run of FX 8 core and Fx16 core for servers using 32nm SOI with Steamroller cores, it would be interesting as it would certainly target 5GHz and with more optimized power management, could bring the TDP in check. This is about squeezing revenue from a market niche that had a demand for such chips. In many server installs, such an upgrade make business sense and incurs minimal downtime which is vital for business.

pelov lov

The perf-per-watt gain for the 45W A8-7600 is very good, but what the 28nm bulk-SHP gives in density it taketh away in scaling. Hard.

Despite adding another ~billion transistors, mostly dedicated to the GPU, the graphical performance hasn’t improved drastically. The memory bottleneck is something that should have been addressed years ago yet it’s been 3 years since Llano and the #1 problem in driving APU performance is now worse than ever . The A10 with 8GCN CUs is pointless unless those shaders have room to stretch their legs, yet they can neither achieve the frequency to do so nor do they have the bandwidth.

At this point AMD needs to take the Bulldozer architecture behind proverbial the shed. Bulldozer was released in Q3/Q4 2011, yet they still haven’t addressed the major issues with the architecture. Single-threaded performance is still poor, IPC is woefully behind, the clock speed targets were impossible to attain, and the ‘multi-core era’ that it was supposed to address never came.

I hope for AMD’s sake that Jim Keller has cleaned house. As a longtime AMD fan, Kaveri is extremely disappointing and not at all what the company needs. Mantle, TrueAudio, and HSA are much like Haswell’s AVX2 – call me in 5 years when we see widescale adoption.

Joel Hruska

I think the reason we don’t see quad-channel is that it’s extremely difficult to make that leap without inflating mobo costs. You have to respin the socket, and use 4-8 DIMMS.

Kaveri’s GPU is 15-25% faster than Richlabd in most 1920×1080, my figures don’t reflect this because I emphasized playability over fidelity. Still, AMD has moved the needle.

pelov lov

Moved the needle only slightly while at the cost of roughly one billion transistors.

Quad-channel DDR3 would also make packaging the chip for laptops more difficult as well. For a desktop part it’s more feasible, but that’s what I’m getting at: AMD desperately needed to address the bandwidth bottleneck issue and they should have done it yesteryear. The bankruptcy of Elpida was the likely culprit for the lack of Kaveri’s GDDR5, but that’s not an excuse. They’ve had years to try to skirt the issue and have done nothing about it; there’s still HBM, DDR4, Wide I/O, and eDRAM — some viable today (eDRAM) while others will be ready by next year. Carrizo looks to be just a shrink at lower TDP (shifted TDP targets and process limitations) while still locked to the same ol’ DDR3.

I just don’t get it, Joel. If they’re going to half-ass it, why bother burning through so much money doing it? Process limitations will require a low power architecture to go along with low-power-centric GloFo 14nm-XM or TSMC 16nm FinFETs if AMD is to remain competitive. It seems to me that no drastic measures have been taken regarding the engineering aspects of the CPU side since Read took over, preferring instead to maintain the same disastrous route. AMD’s CPU division is in dire shape, and getting out of a dire situation requires taking extreme and forward-thinking measures. Trinity was too early, but the extra year they gained with Steamroller by releasing Richland should have allowed them enough time to provide at least some measurable changes… yet nothing at all came out of it.

Joel Hruska

Pelov,

I don’t buy the transistor thing. I haven’t believed AMD’s transistor counts since they yanked 800M transistors out of Bulldozer. Common construction for cache is to use 6 transistors per bit. Do the math on that, and Bulldozer had 800M worth of transistors in just the L2/L3 caches. Did AMD build eight CPU cores (even small ones), including the L1 cache, the memory bus, the I/O, and the other on-die function blocks in just 400M transistors? That’s less than fifty million transistors per core, and Bulldozer just isn’t that small.

If the original 2B figure for Bulldozer was oddly high, the 1.2B was oddly low. And while the 1.3B figure for transistors in Richland made more sense, 2.3B for Kaveri is another headscratcher. So either the transistor counts are being estimated differently, or some other form of obfuscation is in play.

Kaveri was never going to have GDDR5. That was a fiction someone dreamed up. I’m not saying AMD never toyed with the idea, but it was never onboard in a significant way. It’s far too expensive, and it requires OEMs to integrate the chips on-board themselves. It also means systems can’t be expanded. AMD doesn’t have the money to throw at launching entire new form factors right now — heck, if you look at their cooling solutions, you can use Socket 754 coolers from 2003 on Socket FM2+ chips in 2013. That’s not by accident — it saves OEMs money on retooling.

It’s clear from looking at AMD’s own data on memory scaling that yes, Kaveri remains bandwidth starved — but there was no way AMD could incorporate a GGDR5 memory controller into Kaveri without swapping out sockets and moving to RAM soldered on the motherboard. And OEMs simply weren’t going to bear that costs.

I don’t assume Kaveri was half-assed. I think Kaveri is the product of a CPU team under enormous pressure to hit iterative, low-cost, low-fruit goals — and to fulfill contractual agreements at GF.

pelov lov

The xtors-per-mm^2 puts AMD’s Kaveri somewhere between Haswell and AMD’s R7-series graphics. The 7750 was around 1-1.5B transistors, so the numbers aren’t too far-fetched.

You’re spot on regarding the contractual obligations :P I don’t think AMD is looking to take on another one-time charge to pay out of yet another WSA.

It’s frustrating, really. The GPU side of AMD is making some great strides and has produced very good GPUs (GCN 1.0/1.1) along with some great ideas (TrueAudio/Mantle), yet the CPU side can’t seem to tie their own shoes.

Joel Hruska

Pevlov,

Here’s my problem with that figure. If the old 1.4B # was correct, then AMD built a CPU and GPU core in the same amount of die space for that # of transistors. Now they add +1B transistors and the only substantial benefit is…+20-30% on the GPU?

I don’t buy that. Or rather, even if both figures are true, I’m not sure either says anything particularly *good.*

nader_21007

Upping the performance is possible by two different approaches:1. increasing frequency 2. adding more CU’s. Frequency increase will increase the power consumption, Increasing the number of CU’s will increase die space and the cost, but but will achive the goal with little power increase. So AMD spent more to have power consumtion as low as possible.

I agree completely with the above after reading numerous data on Kaveri and benchmarks. One thing that was NOT emphasized anywhere was the memory controller die size on the chip. It is HUGE!. More area than 2 steamroller cores!!. It has got be real complex for a version 1 implementation of HSA. I am certain Apple will pay attention when they see OpenCL/HSA performance from the APU. Possibly seeing APUs in future Mac Mini and iMac products as these are desk bound workhorses!.

Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez de Velas

Kudos to that!

David Stanley

Would have been nice to see a windows 8.1 comparison as it is HSA compliant

Joel Hruska

I’m sorry. This entire review was done in 8.1. I’ll get that added.

Phobos

$173 for the A10 7850k I think its a bit too much, more of a $150 price tag.This APU needs DDR4 badly, it won’t be possible to game at 1080p with just ddr3 for this APU’s unless dual graphics kicks in and even then not every game takes advantage. HSA looks promising, hopefully MANTLE will be the same.

Joel Hruska

DDR4 will be higher bandwidth but also higher latency. Unless AMD decides to leap for quad-channel implementations (which they could theoretically do), it won’t be a magic bullet. No one expects high-frequency DDR4 to ramp for several years.

Phobos

just like ddr3 if I remember correctly it start out with 800MHz now we have 2100~ 2400MHz, I don’t think they can squeeze more out the ageing ddr3 and it has been proven APU’s are dependent on faster memory. I hope this will be the last APU that will use ddr3.

Joel Hruska

Phobos,

Good question. The only Intel platform adopting DDR4 in 2014 is Haswell-E. I suspect we won’t see it in APUs until 2015. And it’ll probably be 2016 or so before mainstream DDR4 has caught DDR3’s overall latency characteristics.

Unless AMD moves to a quad-channel architecture, we’re always going to see a bandwidth constriction.

ziffster1

au contraire joel, you know (or should, being extreme) that the whole industries going to Wide IO2 with 25.6GBps to 51.2GBps data rate over a 421 ballgrid per single package for SOC.

it was even suposed to be here in Q3 2013 retail but for JEDEC slipping in another slower/higher power than WIO DDR4 spec long after WIO was already ratified, to milk the markets.

and OC its sibling “Hybrid Memory Cube” for servers that provides at least 15x more bandwidth than today’s best DDR3 and/or if you prefer 7x more bandwidth than this so called DDR4

“Want to go really, really fast – say, up to 320GBps? And while we’re at it, how about with 70% less energy per bit than DDR3 and 90% less board space than today’s RDIMMs? Then take a look at the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC), which is expected to go into mass production in 2014.”

hell even the x86/64 Linux dev’s are now taking lots of ARM cortex optimized code and idea’s IOMMU/zero copy, mobile GFX compression etc and porting it to upstream Linux, and all that’s primarily taken directly from the ARM/cadence standard generic CoreLink CCN interconnect and related IP and infrastructure including the multi corp http://www.linaro.org/ initiative optimization work etc , so AMD with it existing licence, could take these extra IP blocks for a few pennies more and come out the other side a lot better off for a very little outlay and time given the existing ARM infrastructure and existing hard IP in the foundries today….

the only question you should be asking is ‘who’s going to be first to market’ the HMC for servers, or the Wide IO from the high profile SOC vendors , or the white box vendors that want more data throughput at minimal costs and time…. alas i don’t think it will be AMD even though they would benefit the most right now…

Joel Hruska

Hybrid Memory Cube isn’t expected until well after DDR4 debuts. I’ve written about this.

We’re looking at 2017 or later for HMC. Wide I/O is functional strictly in prototype right now. We might see that tech deploy by 2015 or 2016 in soCs.. In short, neither has any bearing on AMD’s current product stacks, or its expected product stacks for the next 24 months.

Edit: The Cadence link you provided in your own comment farther down lists 2015, not 2014 for production. I expect that will slip further, and the tech will take longer to mature.

ziffster1

interesting, where did that expectation come from ?
edit:now seen your other reply so i guess that’s it.

i took my generic dates from the original December 13, 2011 CEA-LETI/ST-Ericsson prototype

“Speaking Sessions
Several speaking sessions during ARM® TechCon were focused on Exynos processors. Here’s a brief summary of each:

Samsung Breathes Life into the Exynos 5 Octa with a New Innovation: This session by Jangho Pae focused on a new Widcon technology for Exynos processor that is being developed by Samsung. Widcon technology directly connects Exynos processor and Wide I/O memory without conventional PCB and wires through Samsung’s innovative TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology. The solution is designed to increase memory bandwidth, and aims to increase the speed of data transfer and reduce power consumption. More details will be available on this technology at a later date.”

among other related news….

Joel Hruska

Samsung has demoed a functional prototype of Widcon at its last analyst day, but gave no timeframe for introduction or incorporation into shipping products. It’s not shipping in 2014. It *might* ship in 2015. I think 2016 – 2017 are more likely.

ziffster1

interesting, where did that expectation come from ?
edit:now seen your other reply so i guess that’s it.

i took my generic dates from the original December 13, 2011 CEA-LETI/ST-Ericsson prototype

“Speaking Sessions
Several speaking sessions during ARM® TechCon were focused on Exynos processors. Here’s a brief summary of each:

Samsung Breathes Life into the Exynos 5 Octa with a New Innovation: This session by Jangho Pae focused on a new Widcon technology for Exynos processor that is being developed by Samsung. Widcon technology directly connects Exynos processor and Wide I/O memory without conventional PCB and wires through Samsung’s innovative TSV (Through Silicon Via) technology. The solution is designed to increase memory bandwidth, and aims to increase the speed of data transfer and reduce power consumption. More details will be available on this technology at a later date.”

among other related news….

Joel Hruska

Hybrid Memory Cube isn’t expected until well after DDR4 debuts. I’ve written about this.

We’re looking at 2017 or later for HMC. Wide I/O is functional strictly in prototype right now. We might see that tech deploy by 2015 or 2016 in soCs.. In short, neither has any bearing on AMD’s current product stacks, or its expected product stacks for the next 24 months.

Edit: The Cadence link you provided in your own comment farther down lists 2015, not 2014 for production. I expect that will slip further, and the tech will take longer to mature.

Phobos

I hope you guys do a review comparing all of the apu’s that came out sense llano to see the performance difference between them. I do feel they are all llano on mild steroids

Joel Hruska

On the CPU side, that’s true. On the GPU, GCN is far faster and more efficient. If I recall, VLIW4 was about 20% faster than Llano, Richland was 10% or so faster than Trinity, and Kaveri is 15-20% faster than Richland. If Llano is 1.0, Trinity would be 1.2, Richland 1.32, and Kaveri = 1.58. A 60% perf gain in 3 years in the same TDP is excellent.

Phobos

forgot to add what about when using dual graphics? will it still be the same scenario?

Joel Hruska

DG isn’t ready on Kaveri. Don’t know yet.

Spazturtle

The AMD roadmap comfirmes DDR4 for 2015 on APUs.
Although the chocie between DDR3 and DDR4 will be up to the motherboard manufacturers.

No time. But you can estimate it. The A10-6800K was 6-10% faster than the 5800K in CPU, 20-30% in graphics.

Dozerman

Has AMD announced anything about Bullet physics receiving HSA support? It seems like it would benefit a lot from it and, being a pet project of AMD’s and having a lot of mainstream support, would make an excellent candidate to show off HSA’s capabilities.

Joel Hruska

AMD demoed Bullet running in OpenCL all the way back in 2009, Doesn’t look like anything came of it after.

ephemeris

The intel chips have large l3 caches on them. While the AMD has signifigant l2 caches. I haven’t seen any AMD cpus with l3s on them. That in and of itself allows a per mhz advantage for Intel IMO.
Its possible to optimize for either platform. I started to say ‘what Intel did with l3,is what AMD does with the APU’,.. but I dont know if that would be entirely relevant. Would like to see the 3D,and Cad/Blender benches.
This stuff is whurring on a 100mhz bus. You can see in some of the benches where the FX (which has faster bus) does well on the H.264x for example compared to the FM2 type cpus. Intel has large caches on a fast CPU. If it where possible to see them compared with the disabled- they would probably be closely (the amd),or lost with comparison to Intels cpus.
It is amazing how a Hyperthreaded Dual CPU is so close to a Quad CPU w/o it. Must be the caches. I dont know. I keep looking for cooler,low wattage,high performance cpus doing the same work or better than past cpu/components.
Thanks for reviews extremetech. !

pelov lov

The L2$ sizes are pretty large for AMD’s APUs – we’re talking about 1MB per integer core/half-module. Generally speaking, the L2$ is 256KB-to-512KB per core … just don’t ask me to define what constitutes a core anymore :D If AMD did add L3$, they’d first have to address the latency issues that currently plague their cache implementations. This was something that was mentioned in the AT article released last year regarding Steamroller. AMD stated that it would be addressed in a “future processor” with no mention of product. Bulldozer had a 1:1 ratio between L2 and L3, but this was mainly for server-related workloads as the architecture was primarily made to combat the Nehalem Xeons in the server space. A large L3, even if slow, was worth the die space for a traditional Opteron. Intel also dedicates about 1.5MB of L3$ to the on-die graphics, whereas AMD’s graphical approach relies on a comparatively weak IMC and no small buffer between the cache and dual-channel DDR3. This is the likely reason why the A10 Kaveri shows little improvement over the A10-6800K Richland despite Kaveri’s GPU being significantly larger and more efficient.

To sum it up: AMD needs a buffer between main memory (now unified) and GPU cache. Intel has recognized this long ago and addressed it in both low-grade graphics (GT1-thru-3) and high-end (Haswell GT3-E with eDRAM), though it’s only the high end that’s worth a damn. An L3 cache on AMD’s APU would not be enough to fix their problems on the graphics side and the small bump in IPC (low single-digits) isn’t worth the die space for the CPU neither.

ephemeris

Maybe HSA is its own memory controller. Or is programable to do so. Guess the difference between programmable transistor is different subtlety than saying ‘program me as a L3’ cache/memory controller. Being an APU,or CPU. Mean ‘address this space on the APU to be a memory controller. .. . . .
The earlier Intel 775s where first I noticed performance gains (big ones) having large L2 caches.
Whatever relevance my statement is will be some time before the programming catches up to the new APU implementations for these new AMD processors.

Joel Hruska

Having a large L2 cache isn’t an automatic performance booster. The problem with AMD’s cache structure is that it’s L2 cache latency is significantly worse than an Intel part:

But L2 cache hit frequency, cache bandwidth, and the L1/L2 relationship all matter a great deal here. Cache speed is a known problem with Steamroller, but it’s not the guaranteed anchor weighing down the chip’s performance.

The L2 caches you remember from the Intel Core 2 Duo days were shared between all the cores on the chip. It wasn’t unusual to see a quad-core with 8-12MB of L2. AMD went with a private L2 and shared L3 for Piledriver, with a private L2 for each PD module. If AMD thought a larger L2 would buy them dramatically better performance, they’d implement one.

Joel Hruska

I checked L1/L2/Main memory latency on Kaveri vs. Steamroller. L2 cache is very slightly better, but main memory is significantly worse. I intend to check it out further when i have additional time.

That’s using identical memory, on the same platform, with both chips locked to 4.2GHz. Latency is also worse (in nanoseconds, not clock cycles) when looking at the Kaveri running in its usual clock speeds.

pelov lov

Yea I noticed that as well. It looks like they’ve fiddled with the main memory. Main memory bandwidth looks to have gone up, though with latency as well.

The L1, despite the talked about improvements, still looks comparatively poor. And the latency between AMD’s L2 and Intel at >8MB isn’t all that large. That’s really, really bad. The entire memory subsystem needs a complete rework.

And as expected, GPU overclocks seem to be limited by memory bandwidth.

Joel Hruska

I should’ve responded to this at the time. Modern chips don’t really use “buses” in the conventional sense of the term anymore. They have system timers and the PCI-E clock is set at 100MHz, but the point-to-point links are high bandwidth.

ephemeris

I mostly look at the ‘speeds and feeds’,and draw my details from the charts I see.

The AMD FX-Series do not have the memory controller within the CPU ?
Guess CPU-Z doesn’t show the bus speed on those systems that now utilize the memory controller within the cpu/apu.AMD server processors are still using the ‘Hypertransport’. But I remember that when the memory controller went into the processor from amd,this all changed. There was the 100mhz bus from Intel,and the 200mhz with AMD. At that time. The question of quad memory controller,and dual memory controller was there. And Intel did it up with a quad controller on a certain platform,and amd still did a dual.

Running the apu,at one 1/3,or 1/4 of speed of cpu,has got to have a affect on speed of the memory controller.

On the topic of memory usage, what advantages would an L3 offer? What about something the size and speed of IrisPro’s L4? Would the benefits outweigh the costs to transistor count?

Joel Hruska

A large L3 offers benefits in server workloads, but you’d never build an L3 the size of Iris Pro. Iris Pro is built with EDRAM, at one transistor per bit. Conventional L3 is 4-6 transistors per bit. A 128MB L3 at even 4 transistors per bit would consume 4.3B transistors.

ziffster1

Joel:

“the chip that posted the most impressive gains is also the chip you can’t buy today. While we weren’t aware of this until late Monday night, the A8-7600 — the 45W chip that AMD has pushed to most reviewers — isn’t actually launching today. Instead, it’ll appear at an unspecified time in Q1. Hopefully that’s just a few weeks away, but for now, the A10-7850K is the core you can buy.”

according to Michael Larabel’s Linux rundown he states

“On the graphics front, AMD claims the Kaveri A10-7850K performance is 87% faster than the Core i5 4670K and 36% faster than the A10-6800K. AMD also has declared big performance wins with Kaveri when it comes to games using their Mantle API over DirectX or OpenGL, but sadly there’s still no Linux Mantle support.”

“Kaveri also introduces a new feature of a configurable TDP. The A10-7850K has a 95 Watt TDP by default, but from the BIOS/UEFI it’s possible to drop the APU down to running at a 45 Watt TDP but at the cost of reduced performance. The configurable TDP feature works on any Kaveri APU but AMD only has optimized it for the low-end A8-7600.”

AMD sent two motherboards for testing — an Asrock board for the A8-7600 and an Asus board for the 7850K. The 7850K had no selectable TDP option. The option was set to “Disabled” and locked there. I tested selectable TDP on the only system I could test it on given time constraints.

The Asrock board had a configurable TDP option, but only on the A8-7600. I did not have time to swap the boards to see if a configurable TDP option would appear on the A10-7850K.

I tested the nightly x264 builds, but they were not compatible with the two-run pass used by the x264 5.01 benchmark. I did not have time to attempt to devise my own benchmark settings or to re-compare all products in a test of my own devising. AMD did not indicate than any HSA optimizations for the x264 binary were immediately forthcoming.

ziffster1

“AMD did not indicate than any HSA optimizations for the x264 binary were immediately forthcoming.”

i meant to point this out the other day but that’s very interesting
after reading the latest videolan/git thats not been updated since Wed, 30 Oct 2013 20:02:28

and nothing relevant in https://github.com/DarkShikari/x264-devel/commits/master as regards so called “Heterogeneous Compute Software” patches i noticed that anandtech had an official embargoed until 14th jan 2014 gfx stating officially at least 4 apps using upstream x264 where “leveraging Heterogeneous Compute is growing” with what it seems is unavoidable totally false advertising on AMD’s part to sell product.

would asking AMD PR for these HSA patches to these advertised open source applications using their Heterogeneous Compute actually force them to get their internal dev’s to write and actually successfully submit upstream for inclusion now :) for this apparent blatant false advertising

ziffster1

“AMD did not indicate than any HSA optimizations for the x264 binary were immediately forthcoming.”

i meant to point this out the other day but that’s very interesting
after reading the latest videolan/git thats not been updated since Wed, 30 Oct 2013 20:02:28

and nothing relevant in https://github.com/DarkShikari/x264-devel/commits/master as regards so called “Heterogeneous Compute Software” patches i noticed that anandtech had an official embargoed until 14th jan 2014 gfx stating officially at least 4 apps using upstream x264 where “leveraging Heterogeneous Compute is growing” with what it seems is unavoidable totally false advertising on AMD’s part to sell product.

would asking AMD PR for these HSA patches to these advertised open source applications using their Heterogeneous Compute actually force them to get their internal dev’s to write and actually successfully submit upstream for inclusion now :) for this apparent blatant false advertising

Joel Hruska

I don’t expect HSA to improve performance in every workload. A workload still has to be portable to OpenCL to run effectively and I haven’t been impressed by the OpenCL support I’ve seen from programs like Handbrake yet. It works, but it doesn’t typically offer dramatic acceleration.

There are multiple pages of benchmarks. is your browser loading the images?

RoboJ1M

No, he meant park benches.
I think he meant to go to extremeseating.com

boulabiar

“Was it worth the wait for the first true heterogeneous chip?
Conclusion: An uncertain future”

I think it’s not the first time you write non objective article that can be detected directly from the title. And IIRC, you got other users complaining about this in previous posts.
Fanboyism is not good, even if you like Intel so much, please try to be objective or to not write about the competition at at.

Joel Hruska

I can tell I’m doing my job when the fanboys complain.

Matthew Ouellette

Article is worthless. You are comparing chips which are aimed at different categories of the market. The price and power consumption of these chips is different by a significant margin, likely up to a factor of 2. If you were going to measure anything it would be overall power effiency of the chip. It would have been even easier to limit the benchmarks to some lower end chips which it would be competing against. Enough Said!

Joel Hruska

All of the comparisons in this story were AMD’s recommend comparison points. AMD explicitly recommends that the 6500T be compared to the A8-7600 and the Core i3-4330. It also recommends comparing the 6800K, the A10-7850K, and the 4670.

If you have a problem with these comparisons, please take it up with AMD.

Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez de Velas

I don’t believe this statement, Im a loyal supporter of AMD and previous APUs compared to icore 5…..how can it be compared to an icore 3?

perfectlyreasonabletoo

“previous APUs compared to icore 5”

poorly

perfectlyreasonabletoo

“previous APUs compared to icore 5”

poorly

anubis44

Not to be a pr1ck, but asking if it was worth the wait for the first true heterogenous chip is a little like asking if it was worth the wait for the Guttenberg press the day after it was built, and pointing to pitifully small number of books that it has printed. The day after Guttenberg finished his press was NOT the point at which to judge the merits of the invention. It only took 50 years (a comparatively mind-crushingly short period of time for book-making back then in the 1450s) however, for there to be more books printed using that breakthrough technology, than had EVER been printed for the whole of history before that.

Obviously, I’m not saying it will take 50 years for heterogenous computing’s potential to be realized. More like 6 months to a year or two for the equivalent, obvious boon to computing that would correspond to what was obvious after 50 years of the Guttenberg press’s existence. So while I applaud the review of the technology and its immediate benefits, we really will need to wait about 6 months to start reviewing the real impact of this technology.

Joel Hruska

Anubis,

AMD’s SDK won’t be released for months. Their OpenCL 2.0 driver isn’t expected until 2015. Developers will need months longer to recode apps, and let’s be clear on this front: No one is really talking about the benefits of HSA as they directly relate to hardware plans.

What this means is that Qualcomm, Samsung, and other companies are fully aware of the potential advantage of HSA. They are aware that yes, HSA *could* become something big — but none of these companies have plans to release HSA-capable products in the near-term.

When I say “Was Kaveri worth the wait,” the question applies to its power consumption, its CPU perf, its GPU perf, its HSA capabilities, and yes, Mantle. But it’s simply unclear if HSA will be widely adopted by the consumer market. Even AMD doesn’t dispute that.

When I review a part, I have to answer the question: “Should you buy this chip right now?” Since AMD will launch new APUs before HSA is widely available, there’s actually no reason to suggest people buy an HSA chip now. Consumers will see no practical benefits before the market has moved on.

A good part is a chip that offers great performance in current applications and at least decent performance in future applications. Thus, AMD’s original Athlon 64 sold extremely well on the strength of its 32-bit perf, even though the people who bought Athlon 64’s in 2003 or 2004 almost certainly replaced those systems before 2009, when WIndows 7 64-bit became widespread.

RoboJ1M

HSA needs some killer apps.
I just hope the tools and software comes before the movement runs out of steam.
I’m looking forward to an ultra low power mobile HSA part which runs apps fast enough to be nicely usable because it leverages all the compute cores.

Joel Hruska

Anubis,

AMD’s SDK won’t be released for months. Their OpenCL 2.0 driver isn’t expected until 2015. Developers will need months longer to recode apps, and let’s be clear on this front: No one is really talking about the benefits of HSA as they directly relate to hardware plans.

What this means is that Qualcomm, Samsung, and other companies are fully aware of the potential advantage of HSA. They are aware that yes, HSA *could* become something big — but none of these companies have plans to release HSA-capable products in the near-term.

When I say “Was Kaveri worth the wait,” the question applies to its power consumption, its CPU perf, its GPU perf, its HSA capabilities, and yes, Mantle. But it’s simply unclear if HSA will be widely adopted by the consumer market. Even AMD doesn’t dispute that.

When I review a part, I have to answer the question: “Should you buy this chip right now?” Since AMD will launch new APUs before HSA is widely available, there’s actually no reason to suggest people buy an HSA chip now. Consumers will see no practical benefits before the market has moved on.

A good part is a chip that offers great performance in current applications and at least decent performance in future applications. Thus, AMD’s original Athlon 64 sold extremely well on the strength of its 32-bit perf, even though the people who bought Athlon 64’s in 2003 or 2004 almost certainly replaced those systems before 2009, when WIndows 7 64-bit became widespread.

poizons

amazing chip, well done AMD!

some affordable dual kaveri mobo is good future too you know.
OpenCL and HSA is not the same, have to wait OpenCL HSA-Enabled driver for games and applications.

Γιάννης Σαμολαδάς

It’s nice to see benchmarks of HSA applications.

I disagree with the conclusion though. The Kaveri CPU’s are clearly geared towards the huge market of everyday users / casual gamers. If someone runs CPU intensive applications that cannot be parallelized to the GPU, then Intel is the only way.

However, the performance benefits that come with the use of HSA will not be disregarded by programmers, who now have a unified CPU + GPU architecture to build their applications.

Joel Hruska

Apologies — I have no idea how to type your name:

Here’s the problem I have with Kaveri: Let’s divide up by categories of casual:

Casual web users won’t notice a difference. Kaveri and Intel tie.
Casual users who transcode video or do photo edits of simple projects will still be faster on Intel.
Casual users who play basic flash games will notice no difference. AMD and Intel tie.
Casual users who do some light gaming on PC titles will see better performance on AMD.
HTPC owners who do video transcodes using that PC will be faster on Intel.
HTPC owners who strictly do playback won’t notice a difference. AMD and Intel tie.
HTPC owners who particularly want low power consumption and HVEC support may be faster with AMD, but AMD’s HVEC decode in HSA isn’t finished yet. Right now, there’s no difference. AMD and Intel tie.

The only casual use-case that AMD wins, hands down, is light PC gaming. In every other situation, including video playback quality, the two either tie or Intel leads.

That’s why the whole “Casual user” thing isn’t really a strong bet, IMO. In order to really win the casual user market, AMD would have to cut prices lower than is reasonable to soundly beat out Intel on all fronts.

Γιάννης Σαμολαδάς

I see your point. The way I see it though, is that “casual” users will not be bothered by transcoding H264 streams. And if they do, they would do it using an all-in-one software with medium quality settings and without caring if the process takes 10-20% more. Most of them will do internet-office-email work with the occasional gaming activity (either plowing farms on facebook or standalone games). In either case of gaming, AMD will perform better because of significantly better GPU.

Admittedly, Intel shreds AMD to pieces when it comes to raw CPU performance. And it does so using less power. Benchmarking e.g. x264, especially the 1st phase (code difficult to parallelize — runs on single thread) will show this.

However AMD’s bet is on hybrid computing. Not talking about OpenCL or DirectCompute here. hUMA. This is a great technology and a milestone for GPGPU’s. All cores (CPU+GPU) have uniform access to all system memory. Given the right tools, you can see wonders in terms of performance. If you try to encode an HEVC 1080p stream on medium/good quality settings on e.g. my i5 3570K, it will do so at 2-3 fps. Given an HSA encoder, a huge boost is expected (many times over). Check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJLYG9Ue3fg

That was a couple years ago, but the situation will have to *massively* improve.

But I don’t think they jumped the bandwagon too soon. Someone had to get the bandwagon moving. AMD decided it was going to be them.

Γιάννης Σαμολαδάς

Situation is definitely going to change with HEVC, since one of it’s initial requirements was highly parallelizable code, but we are looking at least 12-18 months down the road here.

RoboJ1M

I’m so glad they did.
The only heavy lifting I do on my CPU is h264 and I’m betting on HSA type CPUs to be the next big thing in encoding. The hex core Phenoms were good on x264 with some experimental OpenCL builds giving a few extra percent. Looking forward to a proper HSA build with h265 coming down the line.

On page two it was mentioned that there was no time to test the effect of the 2400 Mhz memory compared to the 2133 Mhz. As far as I know that would have a large impact on igp performance, so has anyone found any information related to this. I found this article: http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/15/exploring-effect-memory-bandwidth-amds-kaveri/ but this only tests the A8-7600, and mentions that the A10-7850k might be different.

Joel Hruska

The gains are fairly consistent. Increasing bandwidth gets you almost lock-step improvement in most games.

So, if Game X scores 50 FPS with DDR3-2133, it should hit ~56 FPS with DDR3-2400.

Marcus Ellwood

ok thanks, thats what I would have thought before I read the article I had linked. BTW nice article, I’ll keep it as a reference while I try to decide what to buy. I don’t want to spend too much of your time, but do you have any discreet suggestions in the same $150-200 price range

Joel Hruska

You mean for a standalone GPU?

The R9 270 is a good $200 option, though it was supposed to debut at $179. Looks like they’re selling for more than that.

And the 650 Ti Boost is out of stock everywhere. Odd. Probably I’d take the R9 270, but I’m a bit surprised at the emptiness of the $150-$200 segment.

Marcus Ellwood

Sorry, I didn’t check this page yesterday. I actually meant for both GPU and CPU, I may build a pc instead of going with a next gen console, but I still wanted to stay around the same pricepoint. The APUs look ok but most reviewers, like yourself, don’t seem too impressed with it. Would an Athlon x4 760k with a radeon hd 7770 surpass the Kaveri in terms of performance. I know this setup wouldn’t be great in terms of preformance, but its about what I could afford, and at some point I could crossfire another gpu. I’d prefer to stay with AMD just because I feel Intel needs competition.

Joel Hruska

Marcus,

There’s going to be some new dual-graphics information coming out from AMD in the not-too-distant future (less than a week), but at a $200 max spend point, I think you’ve got the best solution identified there if you want to stay with AMD hardware.

fteoOpty648

Best review so far on Kaveri!!!. Well done ET. Considering the promise of Mantel with 30-40% improvement in graphicsm then OpenCl/HSA optimizations that give anywhere from 33% to 2.3x, it is definitely a very exciting chip not seen in the past 2 decades!. Getting one ?. You betcha, getting two of these ….

Dozerman

Two? Just in case one is DOA? ;)

Too bad dual-proc motherboards aren’t as big as they used to be…

Paul

I got the a10-6800k about a month ago and am wondering if it is worth upgrading my motherboard supports the apu so all I would have to buy is the apu itself but is it worth the upgrade or should I wait till the next gen.

Joel Hruska

Unless you’re gaming only on the integrated GPU, I wouldn’t bother.

Dozerman

I know I’m kind of late on the comment, here, but I’ve been wondering if the chipset would allow me to keep the iGPU active alongside a dGPU. I’m currently planning my out and saving up for my next build and I want to have an AMD APU alongside a discrete Nvidia GPU with the APU handling the GPGPU work that I seem to find myself working with a lot and the Nvidia GPU pushing graphics, chipping in when I need all hands on deck for bigger jobs (like the recent “apply four filters to every picture I took on vacation for my mom so she can put them in Facebook” job I just did a few weeks ago).

Joel Hruska

Announcements coming about this soon.

Dozerman

Great. Thanks for the quick reply.

Joel Hruska

I haven’t been briefed yet myself, so don’t read too much into this, but NV and AMD have never been the best at playing nice together. It should be possible to tell individual applications to use one GPU or the other, but I can’t speak to whether full offload capability will be available in all cases.

Dozerman

TL;DR: It depends, but I can usually get mixed setups going fairly well. As far as telling a particular program to use one or the other, it is actually possible with most that I use CGminer being the most user-friendly, although MuseMage and Vreveal just use everything.

I have, on a few occasions, run mixed graphics setups before with mixed results (I have access to a place called the airman’s attic where people drop off junk and and others can come and pick up whatever they want. They usually end up throwing away computers because people think they’re junk, but I’ve found some jewels in there, too, as well as buying my own parts, so I’ve had my fair share of computer parts) It seems highly dependent on the architecture and driver versions, but for the most part, I can get respectable stability without comprising performance, although I’ve also had some horrific setups, too. I had two new 5770s one time and eventually married them to a salvaged GT640 with great results for about a year and was able to run all kinds of CUDA apps and even for awhile had those old hacked drivers for awhile that allow PhysX to be run on AMD cards.

After awhile, I decided it was time to upgrade and consolidate, so I did away with the whole original mess and went with a single GTX 660ti. It worked well for awhile, but I missed the low-end scalability that the AMD cards offer. Eventually, I got my hands on a second-hand 7770, sold off the 660ti and bought a companion 7770. I threw in the GT640 for good measure, but when running OpenCL accelerated software, I would get a “Nvidia graphic driver stopped working and has recovered” error.

I finally decided that it was time to get a high end card and stick with it for awhile (I’ve wasted a lot of money on this stuff), saved up for awhile, and eventually got a 290x to be my only card for the next few years, but even without an Nvidia card in the system, I’m still having terrible problems with incompatibility issues. I actually had to go so far as completely reinstalling windows on a cleanly formatted partition.

Joel Hruska

I’m sorry for not getting back to you sooner.

Did that fix your compatibility issues? What wasn’t compatible?

Dozerman

I honestly thought you had ignored my comment, which was completely understandable. :)

I think the older Nvidia drivers were causing a problem with the new AMD card. Maybe they changed something in the registry, or maybe it was a third party issue; I could completely see something else completely unrelated to drivers at all. In the end, though, all of my data is stored on a remote machine, so a complete format and driver install later, I’m happily humming along with a very stable system.

FreeBSD

Nice!

Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez de Velas

Why are graphs wrong, 7850 should be par with icore 7 slightly less…this is all wrong

Joel Hruska

The A10-7850K is utterly unable to compete with any Ivy Bridge or Haswell desktop Core i7. Sorry.

Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez de Velas

No check latest reports, A 7850 in unconventional tests gives higher performance tan either icore 7 or haswell.
Hate to tell you but you are W.R.O.N.G

Joel Hruska

I own the hardware. I’m in direct contact with AMD. If AMD felt the results were inaccurate or non-representative, they’d have told me so or brought it up already.

The A10-7850K’s CPU is slower, at every step, than the equivalent Haswell. There are no scenarios in which this is untrue.

Not like any programs will be able to use all this processing power for the average gamer, I still have a x6 1055T OC @ 3.8Ghz from 5 years ago and it’s still way more than I need for all my gaming needs.

Dr. NEGA

rumors are circulating that Apple will be using the latest AMD apu’s on new imac 2015

it all starting 2010 that AMD and apple are in some secret licensing deals that they won’t admit yet due to Intel frustrations …then one apple engineer is working with AMD for future osx implementation’s, finally the leaked specs of AMD excavator 6 core APU but still not yet confirmed either both parties…then APPLE announce latest products coming for 2015..imac’s, mac pro, ipads…also apple seems they working with AMD stacked memory technology for a custom cpu…

junkyardnut

Dollar for dollar, AMD stands toe to toe with Intel.. Intel buyers are not price sensitive..

junkyardnut

I need a benchmark test that measure how fast your eye blink is..

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